How Austrian Can Mark Blaug Get?

In Austrian circles, Mark Blaug isn’t a popular figure. Many Austrians remember his characterization in his 1980 book, The Methodology of Economics, of Mises’s methodological writings as “so cranky and idiosyncratic that they have to be read to be believed.” In Economic Theory in Retrospect Blaug has tough things to say of Böhm-Bawerk’s capital theory.

And yet, Professor Blaug seems to become very Austrian in his later writings. Here is a smashing from 2003 of the “formalist revolution” in economics that Pete Boettke would find little to disagree with. Here is a thoroughly Austrian defence of “dynamic competition” from 2001. He also has a series of conference papers on “ugly” or “disturbing” currents in modern economics which are all attacks on modern formalist economics, often with substantial Austrian content.

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Blaug, like Richard Vedder, seems to be getting more radical — in some areas, at any rate — in his old age (he was born in 1927.) But it’s in the context of a ‘science’ gone wrong — it needs to be more ’empirical’, etc. And for some reason, in neither paper would he give a direct reference to Hayek: only to his (Blaug’s) own work in which he had the quote from Hayek…